Nafeesah Riaz, who holds an MA in Chinese and History from the University of Edinburgh, examines the representation of spiritual crises in Chinese visual culture.
In a 1937 issue of Shidai manhua 時代漫畫 (Modern Sketch), four deities stare out from the page, but something is profoundly wrong. Buddha grins maniacally, clutching a bag of money in one hand and a necklace of human skulls in the other. A swastika which was once a symbol of prosperity in Buddhist iconography, now distorted by the Nazis, brands his forehead. Beside him reads cishanjia 慈善家 (‘philanthropist’), which feels like an ironic attack. Above, another Buddha has withered to a skeletal frame, labelled “drug addict,” while a winged dollar sign floats away in smoke. On the left, the Daoist immortal Liuhaichan, usually embodying the caishen 財神 (‘God of Wealth’), dances gleefully atop an emaciated brown man, his feet literally bloodied. Guanyin, the Buddhist embodiment of compassion, drip-feeds another starving figure—her caption reads “person who lends money at interest.” The title is sidajiekong 四大皆空, literally translating to ‘all four elements are empty,’ and meaning ‘all physical existence is vanity.’ This appeared in one of China’s most popular pictorial magazines, consumed by millions. Why?
Modernity Without Secularisation
From 1880-1949, China underwent profound transformation: imperial collapse, foreign invasion, rapid urbanisation. Technological advancements, such as those made in lithography, facilitated the development of a mass pictorial culture, which both reflected and constituted the evolving realities of Chinese society amidst rapid change. Western scholarship assumes modernisation necessitates secularisation: religion retreats from public life, dismissed as mixin 迷信 (superstition). () Yet religious symbols and spiritual concerns remained central to China’s modern public sphere. Religious imagery didn’t disappear, it proliferated. But at times, it appeared distorted, corrupted and grotesque. These images reveal not religion’s absence, but a spiritual crisis at the heart of Chinese modernity.
Print Culture as a Spiritual Battleground
New print technologies became sites where moral anxiety, religious disillusionment, and existential uncertainty were made visible. Figure 1 exemplifies this where each figure represents a theological betrayal. The image seems to ask with anger: How can morality exist under the conditions of modernity? When capitalism commodifies everything, what remains sacred? If deities that once embodied virtue have become perpetrators of exploitation, what ethical framework survives? The Buddhist idiom sidajiekong (”all is vanity”) offers a nihilistic answer: nothing holds meaning anymore. The spiritual foundations of society are in collapse.
This was not isolated. Across pictorials peaceful deities were (de)constructed into villains and divinity was dismantled. Spirituality was not abandoned but occasionally contested and reimagined through grotesque inversion. Violence directed at sacred figures reflects disillusionment rather than indifference towards religion. The publishing of millions of morality and religious books, a form of quanshan 勸善 (“morality-encouraging”) activities, attracted an avid readership, which further indicates the manifestation of a spiritual crisis. It suggests Chinese readers engaged in introspection and searched for morality in spiritual teachings during the chaotic modern era, even as commercial pictorials expressed doubt about whether these ethical frameworks could survive modern conditions.
The Erotic-Grotesque and Moral Crisis
The distortion extends beyond deities into ero guro, an artistic genre that delves into themes of eroticism, sexual decay, and decadence, blending elements of both eroticism and grotesqueness. Originating in 1920s Tokyo, it became popular as part of a cultural movement in bourgeois society known as ero guro nansensu, which devoted itself to the deviant, bizarre, and absurd. I argue the erotic- grotesque seemed to have a parallel proliferation in China, evidenced in the covers of Shanghai Manhua which has been analysed by Ellen Liang. She demonstrates that the covers depicted modern women as seductresses embodying urban temptations, linking femininity with death, sex and commodification. I would like to add to her analysis by suggesting that underlying presentations of the erotic-grotesque was, aside from cultural decadence, a crisis of morality.
One cover features a voluptuous nude blonde in flames, grasped by vicious green demons that are about to devour her. Liang says little about the implicit inference to religion made in this cover. The combination of both the fire and devil-like demons create a discourse suggesting symbols of Hell. If the modern female body is an embodiment of the city itself, this suggests the city belongs in Hell, being devoured by devils. In Mu Shiying’s Shanghai Foxtrot, he writes Shanghai was a ‘heaven built on hell.’ By evoking images of lust, crime and corruption through descriptions of an ‘aroma of sex, waiters in white, prostitutes, pimps, kidnappers,’ he implicitly outlines how the chaos of modernity provoked a spiritual degradation where ‘morality gets trampled underfoot.’ Figure 2 can then exemplify anxieties about a sinful existence that results in men and women [descending] to hell. An artistic discourse of spirituality is played out in expressionistic terms, where the erotic-grotesque represents a spiritual crisis. Together, the images are perhaps didactic in nature, conveying anxieties about contemporary hedonism which results in sin and a moral crisis. Put simply, these pictorials gave visual form to experiences of dislocation and ethical uncertainty.
In other pictorials, femininity was often desecrated. Over time, the female body was undressed and violated: from being poised, resplendently dressed and graceful to becoming dismembered, mutilated, and disembodied. The grotesque became a language for expressing social breakdown.
A Global Pattern
China’s case exemplifies a broader pattern. Across moments of accelerated modernisation (Weimar Germany, Meiji Japan, postwar America) societies turned to mass media to process religious and moral dislocation. The erotic-grotesque emerged simultaneously in 1920s Tokyo and Shanghai, suggesting shared responses to capitalist transformation, urban alienation and war. (See Utagawa Kuniyoshi and later Toshio Saeki).
Today’s digital memes function similarly: mass-reproducible visual media where communities process collective anxiety through distortion and dark humour. These moments are not secularisation’s triumph: religion doesn’t disappear but becomes the language through which crisis is articulated. Distorted deities, imagery of hell and obsessive returns to sacred symbols prove how spiritual frameworks remain indispensable even when under assault. When we see violence, gore, and death saturating popular media – decapitations, rape, mutilation – this is more than simply cultural decadence or sensationalism. It’s horrific. And that horror demands we ask spiritual questions: What does it mean when entire societies become fascinated with depicting violence? What strain are these images registering?
When Buddha clutches his money bag and naked bodies writhe in hell, we witness faith’s desecration. China’s mass pictorial culture shows that spiritual consciousness remained central as contested terrain. Moments of rapid modernisation produced psychic, moral, and spiritual strain, and mass visual culture was a register for that strain.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Religion and Global Society nor the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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